


never leaving well enough alone

by magneticwave



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:02:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26601853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/pseuds/magneticwave
Summary: Vanya Hargreeves’ sixteenth birthday is the happiest day of her entire life.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 46
Kudos: 330





	never leaving well enough alone

**Author's Note:**

> This is set after the season one finale in a universe where Five’s inexpert time jumping results in everybody merging with their teenage selves because who doesn’t love a fix-it masquerading as a high school AU. Am I the four thousandth person in this fandom to write a fic with this exact premise? Yes!!

Vanya’s last day as a fifteen-year-old is business as usual. Nothing occurs that might helpfully identify it as a day of distinction; when she tries to recall any specifics years later she’s unable to isolate it from any of the other early fall days of that year. Diego and Luther had been arguing at breakfast, hadn’t they? So Vanya had silently eaten her oatmeal, taken her pill, and gone to school. She’d had lunch outside in her usual nook, hadn’t she? Behind the gymnasium, with a silent and smoking Nikki Nilsson-Ngo for company, just like every other lunch period of ninth, tenth, and eleventh grade. She’d presumably come home, finished her homework, practiced the piece they were working on in orchestra that semester--Saint-Saëns; Vanya is later pretty sure of this, because she very distinctly remembers Klaus banging on their shared bedroom wall every time she started the Hens and Roosters movement--and then trooped down to dinner with everyone else, where she ate dry chicken and listened to a lecture on the record player. 

Vanya’s last day as a fifteen-year-old passes quietly, filled with busy work and tinged by crushing omnipresent loneliness: indistinguishable, in other words, from the one thousand and forty-eight days that had preceded it.

~

That night, Vanya has a strange dream. She is walking down a long, dimly lit corridor, the walls of which are covered in white ceramic tile. Sound echoes strangely off of the tile, making it sound like she is surrounded on all sides by whispering voices. There’s the occasional scuffing sound, like shoes, but when she turns around, there is no one behind her.

One of the voices hisses, “Don’t you even think about it, you fucking cretin.”

“She just _killed the entire world_ ,” another voice says, loudly, and there’s a susurration of shushes immediately afterwards. Vanya, disoriented, feels like her ears are being vigorously brushed.

The first voice--a low and menacing whip--says, “Yeah, and I wonder who pissed her off? Was it the idiot who locked her in a fucking torture chamber?”

More scuffing. Vanya stops walking for a moment and turns in a full, slow circle, but there’s no one to see. Just her, alone, surrounded by tile. There is neither a beginning nor an end to the corridor. Perhaps this is what the subway looks like. Vanya has never been allowed to ride the MTA.

“I just want to check--”

The first voice says, “You’re going to check _nothing_. Go back to bed before the old man sends Pogo to see why we’re all out here. For Christ’s sake, have none of you learned anything about covert operations in the last two decades?”

This, at least, is a point of familiarity. “Pogo?” Vanya calls, softly.

Instead of Pogo’s dry, comforting voice, a third voice full of belligerence says, “Do you really want to be throwing around accusations about people’s competencies? Now we’re stuck in Y2K and we _all_ have to go through puberty a second time, fuckhead.”

Conscious of her lack of other options, Vanya continues down the corridor. The scuffing noises are getting louder. Perhaps there will be a corner soon, and when she turns it, she will be able to see who is speaking. Perhaps they are playing shuffleboard, and that is the source of the strange noises. Vanya has seen a few of the neighborhood old men playing shuffleboard in the morning when her father’s driver takes her to school.

“Guys, come on. He has a point. If anybody should talk to her, it should be Allison. She’s the only one who didn’t, you know. Want to--” and the fourth voice trails off suggestively. 

Vanya almost calls out for Allison, but she stops herself at the last second. Even if Allison is one of the voices, there’s no guarantee that she would feel obliged to help Vanya. That’s not really the kind of relationship they have. 

For five, six, seven agonizingly long steps there’s only the sound of Vanya’s heels striking tile and then there’s a wheezing gasp, bouncing off the walls of the corridor and invading her eardrums from all sides. Vanya feels as though she’s inside of someone’s lungs, being squeezed.

“Ah,” the fourth voice says tepidly. “Maybe not, then.”

The corridor begins to go dim. It’s becoming harder and harder for Vanya to make out the individual tiles. She reaches out and touches a wall, to make sure that it’s still there, and the surface of the tile is strangely dusty under her fingertips. When she rubs them together, she can only just make out a dark grey smear. The sight tickles her memory, and after a long few seconds she is able to place it: Capture the Flag in the library, Diego tackling Ben, Vanya knocked into the fireplace like a rebounding billiard ball. By the time she’d crawled her way out, her shirt had been covered in dirty smudges and she had been sent to bed without dinner; conduct unbecoming of an Umbrella Academy student. Even then, Vanya had known to protest the indignity of it: _I’m not even part of the Umbrella Academy!_ she had sobbed to Mom, who had helped her clean the dark little pebbles of charred wood out of her knees.

“No one else talks to Vanya,” the first voice says. Underneath a surfeit of irritability is something else, a familiar little tonal wriggle to her name. Who was it that had always said her name like that?

Quietly, like she is speaking to a ghost, Vanya inquires, “Five?”

The corridor goes dark.

~

Vanya’s alarm pulls her out of the arms of a deep, profound sleep at six. She smacks around on her bedside table for a few seconds until she manages to silence it, her eyes still screwed shut. The day alway seems at its most promising before she opens her eyes. As strange and sometimes wretched as her dreams are, Vanya prefers their limitlessness to the more mundane constraints of her waking life.

Then, loudly: “Vanya.” She shrieks and falls out of the bed, opening her eyes just before she hits the floor and there in a blur of dark hair, pressed blazer, knobby knees--

“ _Five_?” Vanya gasps, tangled in her flat sheet and quilt, the collar of her pajama top twisted around her neck. He’s standing between her bed and the window, hands in the pockets of his shorts, looking irritated and bored and perfectly coiffed, almost exactly how he’d looked two years, ten months, and fourteen days ago when he’d stabbed a knife into the dining room table and gone off to prove to their father that he could time travel.

“Five,” Vanya repeats, and this time it’s a wail, embarrassingly enough. She struggles her way out of her nest of bedding, crawls to her knees, and then to her feet, and then she throws her arms around his neck in a wet, blubbering chokehold. She has to go up on her toes a little bit to manage it; he’s grown in his years of absence, predominantly vertically. “Five, you’re home,” she sobs, knowing that he hates both tears and hugs and yet completely unable to prevent herself from doing either of those things.

He tenses in the circle of her arms. “Yes,” he says, some number of seconds later.

“Three years!” Vanya reminds him. “You were gone almost three years--it’s our birthday, we’re sixteen--you promised never to leave me and you _left me for three years_ ,” and that’s the last she manages to get out, around the horrible, mucosal lump in her throat. It chokes all of the other things she wants to say: why did you go, why did you leave me, where did you go, why didn’t you come back right away? All horrible, self-centered things to ask someone who has done God knows what in God knows when; only something really terrible would have kept Five from coming back immediately to gloat about his time traveling exploits. 

Vanya recovers herself enough to loosen her grip. She’s a little surprised that Five doesn’t immediately hop backwards, out of range of another inconveniently emotional embrace, but he looks to be stuck fast. When she knuckles the film of tears out of her eyes, she sees that he has a strange expression on his face. “Three years?” he says.

“Two years, ten months,” she tells him, “and fourteen days.” She then corrects, “Sorry, fifteen. It’s the first of October today.” God, she’s such an idiot; like he wouldn’t remember his own birthday.

The tears won’t stop, so she’s forced to cup her hands under her eyes to catch them. She’s probably super snotty and gross but she’s finding herself too incandescently happy to care. All of the murky loneliness filling up her hollow insides feels suddenly shot through with light, like when the clock ticks over into late afternoon and suddenly the sun is able to stream through the stained glass of the library windows, transforming their dark panes into brilliant shades of blue and red.

“I left the kitchen light on for you, last night,” she tells him. “Did you see? And a sandwich. Mom ran out of fluff so I used mini-marshmallows instead. I hope they weren’t stale, they seemed pretty old.”

There’s a look on Five’s face that suggests that Vanya has suddenly stopped speaking English. “Five?” she says, and then, “Are you okay?” It occurs to her suddenly that he could be very much _not_ okay and maybe that’s why he came back. “Are you hurt?” she asks him, forgetting about her tears and snot in her rush to check him for injuries. Her hands go up to his collar, loosening his tie and unbuttoning the top two buttons to check for bandages. He’s wearing Klaus’ shirt, she realizes; there’s a little _4_ embroidered on the inside of the collar.

Five puts his hands over the backs of hers, pushing down until her palms are flat against his chest and her fingertips are curled over the dip in his clavicle. She stills and looks up--looks _up_! at Five!--at his face. His mouth is slightly open; his eyes, underscored by dark smudges of bruised capillaries, are very, very bright. “What’s the date?” he scrapes out.

“October 1st,” Vanya says. And then, remembering that she’s talking to a time traveler, she adds “2005.”

There’s a dried smear of something brown on Five’s chin, just under his jaw, visible to Vanya because it’s now level with her eyes. Whenever Five went, it was clearly a time period with access to human growth hormone. If he weren’t still so skinny, Vanya would think he’s been doping like those baseball players everybody at school is obsessed with. 

Vanya absently withdraws her left hand from Five’s grip, licks her thumb, and rubs at the mark. She sees Five’s pulse leap in the crook of his neck, like there’s an animal caught under his skin. She’s distracted by it as she returns her hand to its original position. His heart is hammering away under Klaus’ shirt.

When she looks up to his bright, disorienting eyes, Five is staring at her mutely. “Should it not be?” she asks him. “How long were you gone?”

“Longer than three years,” he says.

“Does that mean you’re the oldest now?” she asks him. “Luther grew, too, so you’re not the tallest--sorry, if you were hoping for that. Maybe we could carbon date you.”

Even though she knows she’s being silly, Vanya can’t find the self-control to shut herself up. She’s always been more of a morning person than the rest of her siblings, hovering above them until breakfast and her morning dose of anti-anxiety meds pull her back down to earth, and they’ve been very clear with her before that they find this trait incredibly irritating. 

She knows that Five is more prone to being irritated than anyone else in the family, with the possible exception of Dad, but she still can’t put a leash on her good mood. This is so wonderful that she’s scared it’s a dream. 

“You are here, aren’t you?” she asks him. “This isn’t--I didn’t make this up? I’m not sleeping?”

Five bites the inside of his cheek. From a distance it might look like his usual expression of incensed irritation--he’s always clenching his jaw to keep himself from yelling at people he thinks are being stupid; namely, Luther and Diego--but Vanya can tell, from her current vantage point, that he’s trying to control some aspect of his expression and he’s struggling with it.

“It’s okay,” she urges him. “You can say it. Whatever you have to say.”

After a long second, he lets go of her hands, wraps his arms around her shoulders, and yanks her into a hug. “I missed you,” he says, very quietly, grinding the words out between his teeth. “ _Fuck_. How did I miss you so much?”

Because she feels the same, Vanya has no explanation to offer. She fists her hands in the back of his--Klaus’?--blazer and holds on as tightly as she can. “This is the best birthday I’ve ever had,” she tells him, muffled by his sweater vest and tie. He smells like Allison’s green apple body wash.

~

Vanya stops in the doorway of the kitchen on her way to breakfast and asks Mom if she can stay home from school for the day. Mom puts a hand on her cheek and murmurs, “How sweet you are! No, dear,” and pats her twice, plasticine fingers cool and gentle. “You can see your brother this evening.”

Vanya sulkily accepts her pill and a glass of cranberry juice and slinks her way to the table. Everyone else is already awake, plowing through toast and eggs and bacon. Five is perched in a crouch on his usual chair, chewing on a corner of a piece of dry toast with an expression of palpable distaste. “First things first,” he says to no one in particular, “we’re getting an actual coffeemaker.”

“Are you kidding?” Luther says around a giant forkful of eggs. “You need coffee? I feel amazing!”

Vanya stands behind her chair between Five and Ben, pausing to slug back her pill and chase it with a mouthful of cranberry juice. “Morning,” she says to Ben, slipping into her seat. Mom has already left a steaming bowl of oatmeal for her. “Happy birthday,” she adds a second later, making sure to sweep that statement in a glance across the whole table.

Although she does not expect much of a response, she is surprised at the long and awkward pause that greets this statement.

“Right!” Klaus says, after a very painful fifteen seconds. “Because today is the anniversary of our death.”

“Birth,” Ben mutters.

“Birth!” Klaus says brightly.

And then, even more surprising: Allison turns in her seat and half-smiles down the table at Vanya. “Happy birthday, Vanya,” she croaks.

“Are you okay?” Vanya asks her. “You sound--really bad. Are you sick?”

Allison coughs and then puts a hand to her throat and winces. “Just sore,” she says, sounding like she’s gargling gravel. She’s also having oatmeal this morning, Vanya notices. Maybe bacon is bad for a sore throat.

“It’s psychosomatic,” Five opines. Allison flips him off.

“Allison, dear, no rude gestures at the breakfast table,” Mom says without turning away from the stove. “Does anyone want more bacon?”

“Yeph,” Diego and Ben say in unison, around mouthfuls of scrambled egg. They’re both eating like they’ve never had Mom’s breakfast spread before. Vanya can’t help thinking that this is Dad’s fault--if he didn’t insist on impeccable table manners during dinner, everyone wouldn’t be so eager to dispense with them outside of his presence.

“Me, too, please,” Luther says politely, having waited to swallow.

The sugar has migrated down the table towards Allison, who has always hated oatmeal and doesn’t look that excited about it now even with about half a cup of brown sugar dumped on top. It doesn’t seem worth inviting a squabble to ask someone to hand it to her, so Vanya plants her hands against the side of the table and makes to push out her chair. Before she can go anywhere, Five jumps from his seat to the end of the table in a sharp crackle of blue light, snatches the sugar bowl, and jumps back to his seat next to Vanya. “Here,” he mutters, shoving it towards her.

There aren’t words for how Vanya feels about Five being home again. Gratitude seems like too paltry of a sentiment to explain the hot sensation rushing through her body. “Thanks, Five,” she manages. 

Klaus, nibbling on a piece of bacon, drawls, “Wow, what do I have to do to get that kind of service?”

Five looks about two seconds from jumping to the back of Klaus’ chair, fitting his hands around his neck, and riding him the whole way down to the floor. Vanya’s seen Five pull that move before and had looked painful even before he grew half a foot. She shoots her hand out and grabs his knee under the table, squeezing it forcefully. _Don’t_ , she mouths at him. She widens her eyes in reminder: it’s their _birthday_. 

Five huffs before stuffing toast into his mouth. Because he’s gone through the trouble of gelling his hair back, Vanya can tell that his ears have turned pink. 

“I can’t believe I forgot that the two of you were like this,” Klaus says loudly yet clearly to himself. “It’s cute. Really. Like puppies or something. What are those dogs that always want to murder people?”

“Dobermans?” Diego suggests, loading an entire triangle of toast inside his mouth like a trash compactor.

“Like two little Dobermans,” Klaus says indulgently, clapping his hands together and beaming at Vanya and then Five.

Five scowls at Klaus and says, flatly, “Keep talking and I’ll pop out your eyeballs with my thumbs.”

“Yikes!” Klaus carols.

“Five,” Luther says, repressively.

Five replies, “Well, it won’t kill him.”

They’re still squabbling when Vanya scrapes the last spoonful of oatmeal out of her bowl. She rinses it, leaves it to dry in the dish rack, and escapes up the back staircase to her bedroom without anyone feeling the need to comment on her activities. There’s a delighted, probably slightly deranged grin stretching her mouth wide. It feels impossible to be upset right now, because Five is home. He’s even threatening to murder Klaus! It’s like no time has passed at all.

~

Vanya’s good mood carries her through most of her morning classes. Not even gym is enough to completely depress her, even though they’re running the track to prepare for the fitness test next week. Despite hating running and everything it stands for, Vanya completes her five loops around the football field, stretches her hamstrings, and does her twenty jumping jacks with something bordering on actual enthusiasm. Afterwards, she washes her face in the locker room sink and slicks on new deodorant, humming Rachmaninoff to herself under her breath as she buckles her mary janes back on. 

“You’re in a good mood, princess,” Nikki observes during lunch. Nikki rarely says much to Vanya during their shared lunches, which are ‘shared’ inasmuch as the two of them occupy the same physical space in complete silence. Upon their first encounter two years ago it had been immediately obvious to Vanya that Nikki was coming here to smoke and didn’t appreciate the company, but Vanya had just wanted somewhere quiet to read while eating her packed lunch and she’d claimed the spot first. In a fit of unexpected courage, Vanya had silently indicated that Nikki was just going to have to deal with sharing the nook, and Nikki had not tried very hard to evict her.

To Vanya’s surprise, what had been an unspoken companionship of mutual resentment has recently undergone some sort of transformation. Since the beginning of the new school year, Nikki has begun regularly saying hello to Vanya. She sits a little bit closer, which is unfortunate because her cigarettes smell vile and upset Vanya’s stomach, but it’s also nice, in the way that company is always nice.

Vanya unzips her lunch bag and pulls out today’s sandwich. It’s liverwurst, her favorite. There are other treats nestled inside the bag--a Tupperware of bright green grapes, two peanut butter cookies wrapped in a napkin, celery and carrots trimmed into neat sticks for a snack after orchestra practice this afternoon. 

“It’s my birthday,” she tells Nikki. “Mom packed my favorite stuff for lunch today.”

Nikki lifts the eyebrow with two piercings in it. “Wow, you really like lunch, huh?”

Vanya can feel her face and chest flush at the look on Nikki’s face. She doesn’t share details about her personal life with anyone at school, per Dad’s instructions, and it’s never been difficult before. She wants so badly in this moment to explain, _my brother’s home_ , but she can’t. It seems like the kind of statement that might invite further questions; for example, _where did he go in the first place?_

“It’s just nice,” Vanya says, awkwardly. 

“I guess,” Nikki replies, dragging on her cigarette and blowing the smoke out of the corner of her mouth, away from Vanya. “It’s kind of cute.”

Unsure how to answer this, Vanya begins to nibble the crust off of her sandwich. “Do you--uh, want some?” she offers. She’d scrounged up enough courage to ask this once before, and Nikki had so thoroughly chewed her head off about it that Vanya had said nothing, to anyone, for the whole week afterwards. 

Today is different, though. Five is home and Vanya is brimming with an unusual amount of self-confidence.

“What is that, bologna?” Nikki says. “No thanks. I’m a vegetarian.”

“Oh!” Vanya squeaks. “I have, um. Grapes?”

Nikki flicks a long glance at Vanya out of the corner of her eye. She’s wearing a lot of eyeliner, more than Vanya has ever seen on any person, even Allison, and it makes the pale blue color of her irises stand out. It’s impossible for Vanya to interpret what this sideways glance means. Hopefully Nikki isn’t going to yell at her again.

Nikki sticks out her tongue and picks a flake of cigarette paper off of it with her thumb and ring finger. “Sure,” she says, once she’s finished. “Red?”

“Green,” Vanya says, digging into her lunch bag and pulling out the Tupperware. “Do you really like the red ones? They’re so bitter.”

“You’ve really never smoked, have you?” Nikki says, with a flash of amusement. “Don’t worry about it, my taste buds are totally fried.” She watches Vanya unscrew the top of the Tupperware and offer her the container. After a few seconds of consideration, she flicks away her cigarette butt and plucks out a grape. “Thanks,” she says, after she’s bitten it in half.

Vanya puts the container on the ground between them and returns her attention to her sandwich. 

Once her crusts have been eradicated, Vanya digs out her copy of _The Odyssey_ \--the Fagles translation; Dad won’t allow it in the house so she keeps it in her locker at school--and begins skimming over the section that they’re going to discuss in sixth period AP Language and Composition today. Nikki lights another cigarette.

“What are you reading?” she asks, abruptly, as Vanya flips the page.

“Oh, uh,” Vanya says, feeling herself flush again--it’s like she’s fundamentally broken--as she fumbles and nearly drops the last of her sandwich, carefully nibbled into a perfect circle of crustless bread, liverwurst, and mustard. “It’s just _The Odyssey_. We’re reading it in Mr. Kuznetsov’s AP Lang section.”

Nikki tilts her head, like a giant bird of prey. “Is it any good?” she asks.

Vanya flushes, if possible, even harder. Is it possible to get a sunburn just from a person’s attention? Maybe that’s Vanya’s Umbrella Academy superpower. “It’s all right,” she says, in a quiet squeak. Nikki is just watching her, silently, smoke curling out of the corners of her mouth, and Vanya hears herself continue, “I’ve read it before. A different translation, by a poet--Alexander Pope? I liked that version better than this one.”

Nikki’s mouth curls. “Oh, you’re one of _those_ girls,” she says.

“Who?” Vanya squeaks.

“You know,” Nikki says, picking up a grape with her left hand and gesturing vaguely towards the school with it. Her nails are short and ragged at the cuticles. She’s painted them dark purple but the polish is chipped. “Those girls that are really into poetry and symbolism. You gotta rev their engine with a little Emily Dickinson first.”

Vanya can tell from Nikki’s tone that there’s a hidden meaning in her words, but Vanya is completely incapable of interpreting it. She decides to take them literally, because the other option would be to say nothing and Vanya wants, more than anything, for this birthday to continue to be special and wonderful. There’s nothing special and wonderful about Vanya fumbling her way into awkward silence--that’s just another Tuesday.

“Do people really find Emily Dickinson romantic?” she decides to say. “She’s kind of sad.”

Nikki leans towards Vanya, close enough that her exhaled breath ruffles the fringe across Vanya’s forehead, and recites in a low voice, “‘If certain, when this life was out, That yours and mine should be, I’d toss it yonder like a rind, And taste eternity.’”

She puts a very particular inflection on _taste_ that makes Vanya feel a little lightheaded.

“Oh,” Vanya says faintly. “I, uh. See.” She stuffs the last of her sandwich into her mouth and chews mechanically, trying to lower her blood pressure. It has occurred to Vanya, peripherally, the way most introspective thoughts occur to Vanya, that she might-- _like_ girls, the same way she likes boys. Which is to say: hypothetically.

This feels almost frighteningly real. Vanya is too scared to so much as look at Nikki; she stares down at the copy of Fagle’s _The Odyssey_ splayed in her lap, trying not to choke on a stray lump of liverwurst.

After an agonizing twelve seconds, Nikki says, “What’s your favorite poem?”

Vanya, too frazzled to even think of another poem, says, “ _The Odyssey_ , I guess.” That’s probably even true; she’s read Five’s copy of the Pope translation so many times that the pages have gone completely ragged. She’d dropped it in the bath once and then cried for hours afterwards, watching his irritated Greek marginalia bleed into clouds of illegible ink. Hopefully he won’t kill her for it when he finds out.

When Vanya chances a sideways glance, Nikki is looking directly at her. She lifts both eyebrows in silent inquiry. “The beginning part, it’s just--an adventure story, you know? It’s fun. But I really like the end. Odysseus comes home and he has to convince his wife that it’s really him. When my dad was teaching it to us, he always said--like, Penelope has to be convinced, so Odysseus tells her a secret only he would know, and then she’s sure. But when I read it I thought that she must have known, right away, and she was just--making him wait. Like he made her wait. Because they’re equals. She’s so clever, just like him.”

Nikki asks, “What’s the secret? The one that only he knows?”

“He describes how he made their bed out of a tree,” Vanya says. “‘Around the tree I raised a nuptial bower and roof’d defensive of the storm and shower.’ It’s all a metaphor for fidelity, really.” She realizes a second later that she’s just said the phrase _nuptial bower_ and wants to die, so instantaneously, that she honestly would welcome the opportunity to be struck by lightning.

Before she has the chance, the end of period bell rings. Nikki stubs out her cigarette on the pavement and stands, wiping her palms on the back of her uniform skirt. Vanya quickly averts her eyes; Nikki wears her skirt rolled up at the waistband, several inches above regulation length, and from this angle Vanya can almost see--

“Happy birthday, princess,” Nikki says breezily. “See you tomorrow.” She flicks a brief wave in Vanya’s general direction before sauntering inside.

Vanya sits in a stunned daze for a full two minutes and then she’s forced to sprint across the school, lest she be late for AP Chemistry. _What was that?_ she asks herself, around a lump of hysterical confusion high in her throat. She has no possible way of answering that question, unfortunately, and so she’s left to stumble her way through stoichiometry and then Euclidean vectors and then Saint-Saëns, blindly, confused and yet curiously elated.

~

Because Vanya is, unfortunately, an idiot, when she arrives home from school and is immediately ambushed by Klaus and Allison, she does not have the wherewithal to think of a good lie when Klaus observes, “Wow, look at those pupils. Are you high? No fair, I want to be high!”

“No,” Vanya says, letting her backpack slide off of her shoulder and down her arm.

“Are you okay?” Allison asks, her voice still low and scratchy. She looks legitimately concerned, somehow, even though Vanya can literally count the number of times that Allison has spoken to her twice in one day on both hands.

“Yes?” Vanya says, dazed.

“That was not very convincing,” Klaus says.

“I think that this girl at school was flirting with me,” Vanya says, slowly, because she’s still processing this thought as she says it. A bare second later, it occurs to her to _whom_ she’s just confessed this and she yanks her arm free from where Klaus has encircled it with his own. “I mean!” she half-shrieks, in the terrified scramble of an animal trying to claw its leg free of a bear trap. 

Too late. “Oh my _god_ ,” Allison croaks, eyes widening. “Vanya! I didn’t know you were gay! Oh my god, this is--Klaus, she’s _gay_ , this is perfect. Vanya, weren’t you ever going to tell us?” She clutches Vanya’s arm in a double-handed grip so tight that it almost hurts. “Were you just going to stay in the closet forever?”

“Allison, what the fuck,” Klaus says.

“That’s very harmful, you know,” Allison continues, apparently in earnest. “People can take advantage of you!”

“They--can?” Vanya says, perplexed.

“Yes!” Allison says with hoarse authority. “You should always be honest about your feelings!”

Vanya can’t help blinking at her. A Hargreeves? Honest about _feelings_?

“She’s right!” Klaus trills. “Complete and total honesty: really, the only way to go. Although you might want to shoot for partial honesty until we’re out from under the old man’s thumb. I’m not sure he’d care if you’re gay, but he’d definitely care if you ever experienced a positive human emotion.”

“Klaus, be more supportive,” Allison orders, scowling at him.

“I’m very supportive,” Klaus insists. “Case in point, I’m just going to--” and he oozes over and links elbows with Vanya, tucking her into his side. It’s deeply, deeply unfair that whatever higher being had inflicted their existence on the world hadn’t seen fit to make Vanya a little taller. “Now tell Big Brother Klaus all about this girl,” he says, tugging Vanya towards the stairs. Allison follows behind them, carrying Vanya’s backpack. “Is she really hot?”

“Uh,” Vanya hedges. “I--guess?” 

“Oh, I bet she’s smoking,” Klaus says. “Baby queer circa 2005, hmm. Let me guess--eyebrow piercing? Sleater-Kinney fan? Does she have that haircut, you know the one?” He drags his index finger in a diagonal line across his forehead.

The answer to all of these questions is, obviously, _yes_ ; although Vanya doesn’t know what Sleater-Kinney is, she had seen Nikki wearing a t-shirt with the phrase written on it in gym class last year. 

“Klaus, don’t be rude,” Allison objects from behind them.

“This comes from a place of love,” Klaus insists. “Love, and, frankly, extensive first hand experience.”

“With lesbians?” Vanya asks, unable to stop herself in time.

“Let’s not get sidetracked by inconsequential nonsense like gender,” Klaus says. “The important question is: has she promised to free you from your petty life of heterosexual drudgery?”

Allison makes a rude noise. “Sixteen-year-olds will say literally anything for sex, Vanya, so even if she has promised you that, you shouldn’t listen to her.”

“No one has said anything about sex!” Vanya hiss-whispers. Somewhere between the overwhelming confusion and discomfort is a new emotion that Vanya doesn’t know how to identify, something that makes her feel like her stomach is full of helium.

“That’s because the old man instituted a sex education curriculum that a Mormon would call repressed,” Klaus says. “Not that I particularly wanted to see Pogo put a condom on a banana, but it certainly wouldn’t have hurt.”

Klaus and Allison manhandle Vanya down the hall to Allison’s room. It’s impossible for Vanya to tell if anyone else is in the children’s wing to bear witness to this kidnapping in progress; Klaus and Allison have her moving too quickly. In about half a second they’ve deposited her on Allison’s bed and slammed the door shut. Vanya listens to the door latch like it’s a cell door clanging shut. Whatever Klaus and Allison have planned, she’s now trapped and at their mercy. She’s never been the focus of their attention before and she can’t help worrying that their motives are self-interested.

“What’s going on?” she asks them. Maybe it’s best to just be direct.

“We’re having a chat about your burgeoning sexual orientation,” Klaus says, puttering around the room. He keeps lifting up piles of sweaters and then putting them down, like he’s looking for something.

Allison rolls her eyes. “Ignore him,” she tells Vanya. “You know that half the stuff he says is just bullshit.”

“ _Half_?” Klaus says, pressing a hand to his chest.

“I know we haven’t--talked, much,” Allison continues, sitting on the bed next to Vanya. After an obvious moment of hesitation she reaches out and grasps Vanya’s hand. Her grip is clammy and a little too tight. “We get really caught up in all of Dad’s Umbrella Academy stuff and we don’t pay attention to you. I shouldn’t have--I should have talked to you, more. I shouldn’t have let Dad push you away.” She sounds so sincere, croaking her apologies at Vanya, eyes wide and guileless in her face. “I’m your sister. That should mean something.”

Vanya does not really know what to say to this. She stares at Allison for a while, and then looks down to her left hand, clasped between Allison’s two damp palms. Vanya used to have hazy daydreams that went like this--Five coming home, Allison wanting to be her friend, everybody paying attention to her. Now that it’s happening, Vanya feels hope ripping open her chest like it’s clawing its way free of Pandora’s box. When everything goes back to normal, she’s going to hurt so bad.

“It’s okay,” Vanya manages. She doesn’t want to cry, so she squints at Allison and tries to smile. “I understand.”

There’s a strange expression on Allison’s face; it reminds Vanya of Mom, for some reason. “Thanks for listening to my apology, Vanya,” she says. Vanya can’t help noticing that Allison has not actually apologized, but it seems like a bad idea to point this out.

“Oh, me too!” Klaus says abruptly, popping his head out of Allison’s closet. “You know, all of that? Me too. It was wrong of me, Dad’s a dick, et cetera.” He pronounces the last word with a hard ‘c,’ the way that Five does, before disappearing back into Allison’s closet. “Are you sure you couldn’t find it?”

“Positive,” Allison says. “Mom probably found it and poured it down the sink. And, frankly, good riddance! Shouldn’t you be trying to sober up?”

“We can’t _bond_ without _booze_ ,” Klaus says, aghast and muffled.

“We absolutely can, because we’re sixteen,” Allison intones with heavy emphasis. “Do you want me to paint your nails?” she asks Vanya abruptly. “A nice pale pink--Dad won’t even notice, but I bet your girl will.”

Vanya can’t help blushing. “She’s not mine,” she mumbles. “We just talked for a while at lunch today.”

“Ooh, what about?” Allison asks eagerly. “Tell us everything she said. Klaus, can you get my box of nail polish? It should be in there.”

Klaus emerges from Allison’s closet with a leather miniskirt in one hand and a clear plastic box of nail polish in the other. “When did you get this?” he demands, wagging the leather miniskirt at Allison. “This is distinctly _not_ following the Umbrella Academy dress code.”

Allison swipes the box of nail polish bottles and settles back on the bed with Vanya. “That publicist is always giving me clothes,” she says, cracking open the box and picking through its contents. “You know, the bad touch one that we won’t leave alone with Ben? I think she’s trying to bribe me into looking the other way the next time she tries to molest him.”

“Not my poor Benny!” Klaus shrieks, hightailing it out of Allison’s room. He’s still holding the leather miniskirt.

“I don’t think he’s going to give that back,” Vanya says in the wake of his abrupt departure. Allison makes a disinterested noise and arranges Vanya’s left hand on top of the box lid. She has three different bottles of nail polish picked out, two of which are clear. The third one is a soft, pale pink, the color of the inside of a shell. As Vanya inspects the bottle, Allison begins to paint one of the clear polishes onto the pinky finger of her left hand. The lid of the bottle of polish says _ballet slippers_.

“Vanya?” Allison says quietly, after she’s finished with the clear polish and begun to layer on a coat of pale pink. Vanya feels herself tense automatically, shoulders pulling up towards her ears.

“Yeah?” Vanya answers, barely audible even to her own ears. Damocles’ sword is hanging above her neck; she can feel with each breath that she’s on the verge of cutting herself.

“I promise that I’ll never rumor you ever again,” Allison says, not looking up. The gentle strokes of the tiny nail polish brush are a steady, unceasing movement. “I just--I really thought that it was okay. I don’t know _why_ , when I try to think about it now it just seems so obvious that I was abusing it, that I was hurting people--but I just didn’t realize. I’m really sorry.”

Vanya can’t actually remember the last time Allison used a rumor on her. Was it that time Allison heard a rumor that Vanya wanted to clean Allison’s room? That was before Vanya had started going to a real high school, back when they were all being home-schooled by Dad and Pogo. Or maybe it was when Allison heard a rumor that Vanya had the flu--which had resulted in Vanya actually getting the flu, and a full week of no lessons or missions for everyone else, because they had to be quarantined while Mom disinfected anything upon which Vanya might have sneezed.

“It’s okay,” Vanya says.

“I wish you--” Allison says tightly and then she bites back the rest of what she wants to say and releases a long, drawn-out sigh. She finishes with the pink polish, screws the lid back on with a strong jerk of her wrist, and begins to layer on a coat of the second clear polish. Vanya has never had her nails painted before and she’s finding the entire process unnervingly complex. “Vanya, you don’t have to forgive me, okay?”

“But I do,” Vanya tells her. It’s even true, conveniently enough; Allison is self-absorbed, like most beautiful, talented airheads, but she’s not deliberately cruel. There are other people that Vanya could spend her time hating, if she wanted to, but the entire process is a little too exhausting. Vanya never builds up enough of a head of steam for real anger.

“I kind of wish you wouldn’t,” Allison mumbles. “Okay, done,” she says, more loudly, sitting upright. “That’s a fast dry topcoat but don’t move for a few minutes, okay?” Allison leans back and shouts, out her open door, “Diego?”

There’s a muffled “ _What?_ ” from somewhere down the hall.

“Is Five still with Dad?” Allison yells back.

“ _Why the hell should I know where he is?_ ” Diego calls.

“You had literally one job, Diego,” Allison shouts. Her voice has gone hoarse and almost completely vanished by the end of the sentence.

There’s a loud thump, some rustling, and then Diego appears in the doorway, glowering at Allison from underneath his mop of hair. “They’ve been in there for five hours, okay, there’s a stakeout and then there’s whatever the hell I was doing down there--”

“Why is it that you have to argue with every single thing?” Allison demands in a harsh rasp. “Did anyone ever get you tested for ADHD? You’re literally only capable of hyperfixation on the stupidest things.”

“Wow, okay, we’re really doing this, huh?” Diego says. He reaches his thumb and forefinger up the sleeve of his grey sweater and flicks out a throwing knife. “Okay, fine. I’m up for it.”

“That’s not--” Allison says, groaning. “Do you have to respond to every situation with violence?”

“You know, your mouth is moving but the only voice I hear is Luther’s,” Diego taunts. “Where’s the boytoy, anyway? Still sulking in the basement?”

“He’s still doing the task that we all agreed this morning that he should do,” Allison says sharply. “Which is more than I can say for you! Ugh, and Klaus! That idiot’s probably getting high in the pantry or something.”

After a long, tense moment, both Diego and Allison burst into laughter. Diego stuffs his throwing knife back up his sleeve and Allison shakes her head, laughing softly, as she puts the polish bottles back into their box. “You know,” Allison says, flicking a conspiratorial glance at Diego before she turns to Vanya, “you only turn sixteen once. We should do something tonight. Sneak out, maybe?”

“Dad’s gonna put bars on the windows to keep Five from running off again,” Diego points out, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe and crossing his arms over his chest. Belatedly, Vanya wonders when he finally eradicated his stutter. “There’s no way we’re going to be able to get out without him noticing.”

“Come on, are you saying you’re not good enough to beat _Dad_? He’s ancient,” Allison teases.

Diego switches his attention to Vanya. A grin and a frown are fighting for control of his mouth. “Well?” he demands.

Vanya stares back at him. “What?” she finally says, when he doesn’t continue.

“Are you in?” he prompts impatiently.

“Me?” Vanya says. She goes so far as to start to point at her own chest before Allison hurriedly intervenes, snatching her hand and pulling it away before she has a chance to smear the fresh polish on her uniform button-down. “Uh, you’re inviting me?”

The frown wins. “It’s your birthday, too,” Diego says stiffly.

“Come on, Vanya, it’ll be super fun,” Allison urges, squeezing her wrist. “I promise, it’ll be really, really fun. Do you want to invite your girl?”

“Vanya has a _girl_?” Diego barks in open-mouthed shock.

“Oh, I don’t--we’re not--” Vanya mumbles, pained. “I don’t have her number. And she’s not my girl.”

Allison grins sharply at Vanya and says, “Oh, not _yet_ , anyway.”

All Vanya can do in response to that is turn red, so that’s exactly what she does. It feels like she’s been dipped head-first into the furnace in the basement. Diego is stuck gaping in the doorway and Allison has her hands pressed to her chest, cackling hysterically, when Klaus reappears, tugging Ben after him by the hand. “What’s going on, kids?” Klaus asks.

“We’re sneaking out tonight,” Allison announces.

“Vanya--!” Diego says.

“Yes, and Vanya’s coming,” Allison says, firmly. From the hallway, Ben gives Vanya an encouraging thumbs up. Vanya goes to return it, remembers at the last possible second that her nails are still wet, and settles for a dorky wave of acknowledgement instead. “Because we’re a family, remember? And families _bond_.”

“With booze!” Klaus says brightly. After a half-second’s look at Ben’s face, he quickly amends, “By which I mean, with _no_ booze. Because we’re sixteen and boring now.”

~

After escaping from Allison’s deranged clutches, Vanya plows through her substantial amount of homework--two chapters of _The Odyssey_ to annotate with her initial thoughts and feelings, a worksheet of stoichiometric conversions, the odd-numbered questions at the end of the next chapter in her pre-calculus textbook--and then dedicates some serious time to Tchaikovsky’s concerto in D major, which she’s workshopping as one of her audition pieces for college applications next year. The last movement is giving her particular trouble.

All through the day, Vanya has found herself suddenly remembering, like she’s been drowned by a titanic wave of divine understanding: _Five is home_. It fills her with hazy joy each time and this particular instant, as she’s flipping through her sheet music, is no different. Even though it is embarrassing and Vanya would never admit it even under torture, Vanya has fantasized for years about her music bringing Five back home. She has logged endless hours in front of her music stand with her most loved composers--all of whom are Russian, because Vanya likes to think that the nationality she shares with them is somehow indicative of mutual understanding--imagining that the songs she played were long spools of fishing line that she flung out of the window and into the universe.

Although the thought of doing so is now so excruciating that Vanya would like to pretend it never happened, Vanya had spent all of July and August struggling to write a violin arrangement for Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto, which has always been Five’s particular favorite. Nibbling on the end of her pen, oblivious to the dots of ink speckling her chin, she had let herself drift into elaborate bouts of reverie: Five, in some distant future, hearing a violinist spool out that familiar tune and being stopped dead in his tracks. _Vanya!_ she had imagined him exclaiming. _How could I have ever forgotten my most beloved companion?_ After which he had, of course, devoted himself to finding a way to return to her. 

After listening to her first draft, Dad had told her that her arrangement was an inelegant response to an already hackneyed piece and suggested that she devote her attention elsewhere. Perhaps Paganini, or Vivaldi. 

Vanya rests her cheek on the belly of her violin, closes her eyes, and sends her fishing line out her closed door, through the hall, down two flights of stairs, and under the locked door of Dad’s study, where Five is probably seething resentfully at whatever punishment Dad has seen fit to bestow for his renegade time-traveling. 

She is so happy that it feels like her heart strings, which Five had once irritably informed her were a figure of speech and not a real physiological structure, are resonating at the same frequency as her violin. For the remaining hour of her practice, Vanya is the instrument and joy is her bow. 

~

Dinner is standardly an experience to be suffered, not enjoyed, and tonight does not prove a special case. If Dad is happy to see Five safely returned to them, it is not apparent in his demeanour. Everyone eats in silence, sawing away at their roast chicken and steamed green beans, while an improving lecture on developing and maintaining study habits plays from the record player. At the end of the meal, Mom brings Vanya her evening dose of anti-anxiety meds in a little metal cup and there is, finally, an interruption: Five makes a brief, hissed noise of frustration, like a feral cat spotting another infringing on its territory, and while everyone’s wide eyes yo-yo between him and Dad and Vanya, Dad announces, “You will begin a new dosing regimen tomorrow, Number Seven.”

“Okay?” Vanya says, barely audible even to herself. After a moment’s hesitation, she tosses back her pill and chases it with the last mouthful of milk that she had saved for this exact purpose.

Dad abruptly stands. “Come to my office before you leave for school tomorrow morning, Number Seven, to receive your new dose. Should you have any questions, I will answer them then.”

“Is that really--” Luther starts to say and he’s immediately hushed by Allison, who reaches over and grabs his wrist so hard that her knuckles go white. If Dad is shocked by this open display of affection, which as far as Vanya is aware has never before occurred in his presence, he doesn’t look it. He is peering at Five through his monocle. 

Five jerks his chin up in acknowledgement and receives a nod in return. Dad straightens the hem of his waistcoat and coolly says, “Good evening, children.”

Everyone climbs to their feet, mutters, “Good evening, Father,” in some measure of unison, and Dad sweeps out of the dining room. There has, predictably, been no mention of birthdays. Vanya can remember when the occasion had been a bit more celebratory, sometimes even with cake, when they were all little and weren’t allowed to eat in the dining room just yet. It feels foolish to long for those times, like being an adult who is still afraid of the dark. 

As they all make their way upstairs, Allison and Luther talking with Ben, Diego and Klaus bickering about something stupid, Vanya leans close to Five and whispers, “Did you say something to him? About my pills?”

Five flicks an unreadable look at her over his shoulder. “Yeah,” he says.

“Why?” she asks him. It is inconceivable that Five has come back from more than three years of time travel and his first item of business is to talk to Dad about Vanya’s anti-anxiety medication.

“Time lends perspective, and perspective lends insight,” Five tells her, sounding uncannily like Dad. “The old man was sensible enough to actually listen to me.” When they’re nearly to the top of the stairs, Five abruptly stops and Vanya bumps into him, bouncing off and nearly tumbling down the stairs. Five catches her, but in a bizarrely efficient way: he twists around to snake an arm around her waist and, when they both fall, he jumps them to the top of the staircase, at an angle where they are able to step smoothly onto the landing. Vanya has never jumped with Five before and it feels like her veins are full of electricity. All of her hair is standing on end.

“Oh!” she involuntarily says, clenching her fingers around Five’s biceps. “You can--with _two_ people now?”

“More,” Five says shortly. “Listen, Vanya, about tomorrow morning--the old man’s a selfish bastard and that’s never going to change. He’s not capable of loving us. Don’t offer him love, or forgiveness. But you should try to understand him. It’s a useful exercise.”

Vanya doesn’t know what to say in the face of this brutal advice. If she knew how to protect herself, she would just do it--it’s not like she enjoys having her feelings constantly bruised. It’s also a little hard for her to think clearly with the lingering little zaps of Five’s blue lightning racing up her arms and legs. 

“Okay,” Vanya finally decides to say. “Thanks. I will--try. To do that.”

Five is very close. A lock of hair has fallen out of its carefully gelled place and is now skimming across his forehead, falling into his eyes. If Vanya looks at this sight for too long, it feels like the bottom has disappeared out of her stomach. “Does it always feel like this?” she hears herself ask him.

“No,” he says, low. And then, a second later, he blinks twice and says in a more normal pitch, “Does what always feel like this?”

“Jumping,” she clarifies. “My arms won’t stop tingling.”

Five abruptly lets go of her and steps backwards. “Sorry,” he says, clearing his throat. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I will?” Vanya asks him. She feels the smile start deep inside her chest before it crawls its way up her esophagus to her face. She’s probably beaming at him like an idiot. “Because you’re going to stay?”

Five stuffs his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “Yeah,” he says, in that way that Vanya has so deeply missed: his voice gone just a little gentle at the edges, soft for her where he will not be for anyone else. Five, Vanya’s only true friend.

~

Vanya thinks up until twenty minutes before they’re supposed to leave that she’s just going to wear her regular clothes--her high school uniform button-down and plaid skirt, sans sweater vest--but she suffers some kind of aneurysm at 10.40PM and finds herself frantically ripping through the contents of her closet like a sweater capable of proclaiming her New and Improved has somehow been secreted inside. Although Mom had repossessed Vanya’s Umbrella Academy uniform after she’d started the ninth grade at a real school, Dad had just had her replace it with the same horrible items, minus the distinctive patch.

Vanya blames this sudden bout of vanity on her freshly-painted nails. The longer she stares at them, transfixed by their smooth, pastel perfection, the more desperate she is to indicate that they actually belong to her. 

10.50PM finds Vanya, frantic, trying her hand at rolling her uniform skirt. The girls at school who do it regularly always look flirty and cute but Vanya feels like an idiot. Worse than an idiot: a troll. A person so unattractive that even the simple task of rolling a uniform skirt somehow makes her look _worse_. After a few miserable minutes of contemplation she rips off her knee socks and replaces them with a pair of navy tights. 

She’s buckling her mary janes back on at 10.58PM when there’s a single knock on her door. She doesn’t even have the chance to call out to whomever it is; a millisecond later, Five jumps into her room, apparently too impatient for even the act of opening a door. Vanya straightens up with an indignant, “Hey!”

Five flicks her with a dismissive glance and scoffs, “What? You’re decent.” Then he freezes, with an expression that’s the visual equivalent of a record screeching to a halt, and slowly drops his eyes down the length of Vanya’s legs. “Did that thing shrink in the wash or something?” he bites out.

Vanya chances another look in the mirror, trying not to get trapped by a whirlpool of despair. While she’s not as cute or flirty as her classmates, she’s at least managed to shift the needle out of troll territory. The tights help a lot; she always feels so self-conscious about how pale her legs are, as if she’s secretly part-fish. “I rolled the waistband,” she informs Five absently, hooking her thumbs in the waist of her skirt and adjusting how it sits over her hips. “The other girls at school do it.”

There’s another knock at her door. Before Vanya can call out an acknowledgement, the door bursts open, revealing Allison and Klaus framed in the dark hallway. They’re wearing twin leather miniskirts. Vanya’s fledgling self-confidence shrivels up and dies. How do both of them look so good in skirts? Why can’t Vanya manage that?

“Oh my god you look so _cute_!” Allison croaks. “Did you roll your waistband? Vanya! You should always do that, you can get away with it because you’re so short.”

“Ouch,” Klaus says.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Allison rushes to assure Vanya. “You’re not _too_ short or anything.”

Vanya is caught somewhere between gloomy resignation and hysterical laughter. When was the last time she got a sincere compliment out of another Hargreeves? The day before he’d left, Five had said, _you are so exquisitely ordinary_ , with a glow suffusing his face that had made it clear this was being offered affectionately. She’d figured that he meant, _thank you for not being a high-strung drama queen_ , which was pretty funny coming from Five. 

“I am,” Vanya says. Maybe she fell getting into the shower this morning and she’s actually in a coma right now. “I am definitely too short. The only member of the family I’m taller than is the talking chimpanzee.”

“You really should wear your skirt like that all the time,” Klaus tells Vanya. “Have you ever thought about pigtails? I feel like a little Baby, One More Time energy could only help you here.”

This reference, which Vanya does not understand, finally manages to push her past the point of being pleased by the compliments and attention. She suddenly feels like the Arlecchino and Colombina dolls must in the first act of _The Nutcracker_ \--put on display to perform some charming trick--and she’s surprised by how swiftly she wishes that everyone would just stop looking at her. “Isn’t it time to leave?” she asks, a little desperately. “I feel like we should all--go. Now.”

“Great idea,” Five agrees briskly. He snatches Vanya’s wrist without bothering to acknowledge Klaus or Allison and jumps the two of them away into the alley behind the academy building. Vanya’s second time jumping with Five is just as disorienting as the first, but this time she’s completely physically untethered. Five releases her as soon as they land and she stumbles for a second, trying to get her knees to hold her up. Five is forced to catch her before she face-plants into a pile of rotting cardboard boxes. 

“Oh,” Vanya gasps. “Sorry--about that. That’s really disorienting. How do you do that all the time and also manage to, like, punch people and stuff?”

Five is holding her elbows to keep her steady. “Okay?” he asks, ignoring her idiocy as he checks her pupils.

“I’m okay,” Vanya tells him. The air whipping through the alley has that cold tinge to it that always characters October and Vanya shivers, grateful that her vanity had persuaded her to put on a pair of tights. Five’s knees must be freezing. “Thanks for catching me,” she adds, and it comes out a little more dreamily than she would like.

Five’s mouth twitches in the left corner, like a softer cousin of his usual smirk. “You’re welcome,” he says. He opens his mouth, inhaling forcefully through his nose, and then slams his lips shut into a scowl as, with a clatter of terracotta tile and scuffling of shoes, Diego and Luther both drop from the roof of the guesthouse over the wrought iron fence into the alley. “I hope you didn’t wake the entire house on your way out,” he snipes.

“Security feed’s on a loop, Tom Cruise,” Diego says. “Chill out, won’t you?”

A few seconds later, Allison’s head pops up over the gabled roof of the guesthouse and she silently skids her way down its slope before jumping over the fence. She’s followed by Ben, dressed in head-to-toe black--he has a leather jacket now, because the creepy publicist is always bringing him special treats--and then Klaus, who despite his knobby-kneed flailing is able to successfully plummet off of the roof to land on top of Diego. He grumbles something about Allison making crime-fighting in a skirt look easy.

“Griddy’s?” Allison suggests once Diego and Klaus have disentagled themselves in a series of loud grunts and slaps.

“Are you fucking kidding me,” Five says under his breath.

“It’s Our Spot,” Allison declares, capital letter emphasis audible even in her scratchy undertone. 

Ben loops an arm around Klaus’ shoulder and steers him away from a red-faced and fuming Diego. “Besides,” he points out, “if anyone comes looking for us, we’re not exactly hard to find these days, what with the giant UMBRELLA ACADEMY sign on the front doors.”

“Is someone looking for you guys--?” Vanya asks.

“Someone is always looking for us,” Diego replies swiftly, tugging on the hem of his jacket where it’s ridden up in the back. “Don’t worry about it.” Having apparently recovered his dignity from being squashed by six feet of skinny medium, he runs a hand through his hair and turns on his heel, making for the mouth of the alley. “How much cash we got tonight? I’m starved.”

“I got fifteen bucks off of the bad touch publicist,” Ben says, tugging Klaus in Diego’s wake. “I picked her pocket when she tried to grope me last week. Cute skirt,” he tells Vanya as he passes her, giving her a quick wink. Vanya can feel a goofy grin break across her face at this and she’s careful not to let it spread into anything too deranged.

“I have twenty-two dollars,” Luther announces pompously, herding Allison after them like a very large mother duck with one single, bright-eyed duckling. He very carefully does not look at Vanya while he does so. Luther still being such a dick is probably as good a bit of evidence as any that Vanya is not, in fact, hallucinating this entire day. “People have started sending small bills in autograph requests.”

“I have nothing!” Klaus trills.

Vanya has two dollars crumpled up in the pocket of her uniform skirt--Mom had run out of carrots last week and tucked two one-dollar bills into Vanya’s lunch bag with a note ordering her to buy herself a snack after orchestra practice--but when she opens her mouth to offer up this sum for mutual consumption, Five grabs her hand and shakes his head. _No_ , he mouths at her. _Save it_.

 _Seriously?_ she mouths back, making a face at him.

Five shrugs his shoulder in a dismissive gesture that Vanya, despite the intervening three years since the last time she saw it, immediately understands to mean, _they’re all fucking idiots_. “Come on,” she pleads in a low whisper as everyone else disappears around the corner of the alley. “It’s just two bucks.”

“You need to start saving that,” Five tells her. “Just because the old man’s being reasonable now doesn’t mean he will be forever. Next week he and I are going to have a discussion about locking Klaus in the mausoleum and that could go very badly.”

Fresh off of a long lecture in AP Language and Composition about diction, Vanya instantly breaks these few sentences down into their component parts: _next week_ , _forever._ Happiness spears through Vanya like pure, liquid sunlight. She wants to cry in a way she never had before this morning: as if weeping might somehow relieve the pressure produced by the joy expanding through her whole body. She ducks down to watch her feet, shuffling in their mary janes, so Five can’t see that she has the stupidest expression in the whole world affixed to her face.

“What is it?” Five asks. “Are you okay?”

“I’m great,” Vanya tells him softly. He’s still holding her hand. “I’m really, really great.”

~

Griddy’s is packed despite the hour being close to midnight; there are the usual grim-faced truckers, eating burgers and downing endless cups of diner coffee, and about fifteen separate packs of riotous teenagers inhaling their weight in donuts. It reminds Vanya of nothing so much as the cafeteria at school and she immediately shrinks in on herself, the same way she had the first day of ninth grade when she had realized that she was expected to pick a place to sit rather than be assigned one. She had immediately fled for the nearest open door, like a cockroach scuttling out of a brightly-lit room.

Allison has already claimed a booth by the time Five and Vanya arrive. It’s not quite big enough to fit all seven of them, but Allison is perched halfway up Luther’s lap and that’s left about six inches of padded vinyl open next to Ben. Five makes it clear with a sharp flick of his wrist that this is where Vanya will sit and then he stalks off to scrounge up a chair from one of the free-standing tables. 

“I think we should just ask,” Luther is saying as Vanya squeezes into her seat. Ben shifts his weight, tilting sideways so their shoulders are pressed together. The look on his face says, _doing okay?_ Vanya smiles at him, tucking her hair behind her ear so it doesn’t waft into his face.

“You always think that,” Diego says dismissively. “You have zero ability to take initiative.”

“I don’t--!” Luther protests.

“Besides, there’s only one correct choice and that’s: as many donut holes as we can buy,” Diego finishes.

“I can take initiative,” Luther insists in a loud whisper to Allison, who absently pats his wrist.

“But the best flavors don’t come as holes,” Ben points out.

“The best flavor is jelly,” Diego says with such hot certainty that Vanya finds herself nodding in agreement.

As Klaus moans, “My god, that’s tragic,” Ben replies, loudly, “The best flavor is strawberry frosted, obviously! Like that’s even in question!”

“As long as I have a full cup of coffee in the next thirty seconds, I don’t give a shit what kind of donuts you want,” Five announces, dragging his new chair into place at the head of the table. He snags the down-turned white ceramic mug on the table in front of Vanya, drops into his chair, and lifts it towards the beleaguered-looking waitress behind the lunch counter. 

“I’m sorry, but have none of you considered the obvious here?” Klaus says. “ _Sprinkles_!”

“Ew,” Allison says. “Klaus, they don’t taste like anything.”

“You’re all tragically heterosexual,” Klaus says. He leans forward, putting his weight on his elbows, and urges, “Vanya, dear, darling: back me up on this.”

Everyone’s attention swings to Vanya except for Five, who is engaging in some silent eyebrows-only conversation with Griddy’s only waitress. Vanya admits, quietly, under this substantial amount of peer pressure, “I like chocolate frosted with sprinkles.” 

“Yes, _thank you_ ,” Klaus says, slapping his hand on the table and then gesturing towards Vanya. “We should’ve dragged you out of the closet years ago, my god, I could have actually won an argument for once.”

“Closet?” Luther and Ben repeat in unison.

Apparently having lost the eyebrow fight, the waitress--her name tag says _Agnes_ \--appears with a full carafe of burnt-smelling coffee. She immediately begins to dispense its contents into Five’s upturned mug. “What can I get you?” Agnes asks, thankfully drawing Ben and Luther’s attention off of Vanya before she’s forced to sink so low in her seat that her body can just ooze off of it onto the floor.

“Strawberry frosted,” Ben gets out, very quickly, before anyone else has a chance to speak. “Two, please!”

With swift certainty that betrays their familiarity with Griddy’s menu, Allison and Luther order milkshakes, Klaus asks for a strawberry sprinkle donut _and_ a milkshake, Diego sulkily requests a dozen jelly-filled donut holes, and Five jerks his head in negation. “And you, dear?” Agnes asks kindly, turning to Vanya.

There’s literally only one kind of donut Vanya has ever eaten, so that’s what she orders. “Chocolate frosted with sprinkles, please.”

“We’re out, dear,” Agnes says. “We’ve got chocolate frosted or vanilla sprinkle. You can fight your friend for the last strawberry sprinkle if you really want.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay,” Vanya says hurriedly. She hasn’t had to fight Klaus since they were about five and she has no interest in finding out tonight if he still bites when cornered. “Vanilla sprinkle is fine. Thank you!”

A spurt of shrieked laughter erupts from a pack of black-clad teenagers hunched over the counter by the front door. Agnes throws an irritated look over her shoulder and mutters, “ _Teenagers_ ,” as she tops up Five’s coffee before bustling off to tend to another table. Vanya can’t help peeking a second glance at the rowdy group, who seem so loud and happy despite their dark wardrobe. They’re all wearing t-shirts screen-printed with the logos of bands Vanya’s never heard of, their tight jeans ripped at the knees and their belts covered in steel studs. One of them, tall and lanky with short black hair, is wearing heavy boots that Vanya finds herself immediately coveting--they just look so _grounded_. They’re the boots of a person who always knows and therefore says what she’s thinking.

The teenager is offered a cigarette by a friend and accepts with a deft hand, laughing and elbowing the people seated on either side. When they lean back in a long stretch, they make eye contact with Vanya, tucked away in her booth by the front door. It’s a girl, her pale-colored eyes ringed with smudges of black eyeliner. With a surge of disembodied horror, Vanya realizes: it’s _Nikki_. 

Nikki does not actually smile, of course, but her expression changes; Vanya can tell because the light from the fluorescent fixture overhead glints off of her eyebrow piercings as they move. Abruptly, Nikki stands and saunters over to Vanya’s table, shoving her unlit cigarette behind her ear. Five is seated between them unless Nikki decides to edge her way around his chair--which she does, inexplicably, so that she’s only a few inches away from Vanya’s elbow. “Hey, princess,” Nikki drawls.

“Hi, Nikki,” Vanya manages. Whatever she’s feeling right now, there’s too much of it for her nervous system to handle.

“ _Princess_ ,” Klaus breathes rapturously; Ben hisses, “Shut _the fuck up_ ,” at him.

Five slowly puts down his cup of coffee.

“You come here a lot?” Nikki asks. Her hair has been gelled so it sticks up in messy chunks, creating the impression that she’d gone home after school and had a long nap before deciding to go out for donuts. It’s not unflattering. Nikki surveys the rest of Vanya’s booth with a quick, disinterested glance. “With your homeschool friends?”

Vanya looks up at Nikki, then down at Five, then back up at Nikki. It has never occurred to Vanya before that she might be a person with a physical type, because what would that even entail? But it is horrifyingly obvious in this moment that she does. Nikki and Five could be twins.

Vanya feels her whole face turn red. Can a person get heat-stroke from embarrassment? Vanya might very well be the first.

“Yes?” she exhales, shakily. 

“Cool,” Nikki says. It’s impossible to tell from her face if she’s making fun of Vanya or not. Nothing could be less cool than going out for donuts with your fellow home-schooled nerds. It’s not like Nikki knows that they’re superheroes. And yet, she follows this up with, “You should call me the next time you want to go out.”

“Okay?” Vanya replies in a squeaky whisper. 

“ _Okay_?” Five says, so loudly that Vanya whole-body jolts in her seat. She almost goes plummeting off the side of the booth; Five reaches out and catches her in half a blink, hand cupping her hip and using that leverage to push her back into her seat. 

“Okay,” Nikki answers, ignoring Five even though he’s now managed to maneuver most of his body between her and Vanya. “I’m gonna go, my friends and I are hitting this show.” Although she turns her lower body back towards her friends, she still has her eyes fixed on Vanya’s face. There might be an actual _smile_ forming at the corner of her mouth. “I’m guessing you’ve got birthday plans already?”

Vanya blinks up at Nikki, mute and in agony. She can’t tell if this is supposed to be an overture of friendship or a more profound romantic gesture and both options are equally horrible. Vanya has no idea how to be someone’s friend--she’s only ever had Five and he’s been gone for three years--and she only has a little bit of a better idea of what’s required of someone’s romantic partner because she’s read a lot of D. H. Lawrence. 

Her traitorous eyeballs can’t stop themselves from drifting down to Five’s face. His eyes are cold and furious but his lips are pressed into a flat, immovable line. Whatever he’s thinking, he’s for once not on the verge of sharing it with everyone nearby. Vanya has no idea what to make of this monumental display of self-control.

“Yeah, I figured,” Nikki says casually after a few seconds of embarrassing silence. “See ya, then.”

“Have a nice night,” Vanya finally manages in a pitchy squeak.

About twenty seconds pass between Nikki returning to her friends and Five letting go of Vanya’s hip and straightening up in his chair. He fiddles with the lapels of his blazer as he does so, tilting his chin down so the swoop of his hair falls over his eyes, obscuring them from view.

Allison breaks the silence, predictably. “Is that the girl?” she asks Vanya in an urgent undertone. “The one you thought was flirting with you?”

Vanya does not have a chance to answer because Diego immediately replies, “Oh, yeah, she wants you,” with a casual lecherousness that makes Vanya’s skin crawl.

“It’s not--” Vanya attempts. She’s instantaneously cut off by Luther, who says, “ _What_ girl?” and Klaus, who exclaims, “You didn’t say she had a little nickname for you! You guys are so cute!”

“That baby goth wants in your pants real bad,” Ben remarks. Luther repeats, “ _What’s with the girl_?” and is summarily ignored.

“Friend from school?” Five asks, not looking up from his cuffs as he shoots them fussily.

“She’s just--we just eat lunch in geographic proximity, it’s not--we’re not--” Vanya offers, feeling nauseated and dizzy, like the frayed edges of her nerves are being subsumed by Five’s disproportionate gravity. Even when Five was gone, Vanya had found herself incapable of doing anything but orbiting the negative space he used to occupy. Twenty-four hours ago, Vanya would have given anything--an arm, an audition at Julliard, her firstborn child--to have her sun back at the center of her universe, and now that it’s happened she wants to die.

Five glances up at Vanya from underneath his fringe of hair.

“Flirting?” he prompts, eyes dark.

“There was--some poetry,” Vanya admits.

Something absolutely feral crawls across Five’s face in the half second that Vanya can see him before he grabs his mug of coffee and drains it in a long gulp. He twists in his seat away from Vanya, gesturing to Agnes that he needs a refill.

“Oooh, dirty limericks, my _jam_ ,” Klaus cooes.

Probably it would be best to say nothing, but Vanya can’t let that slander stand. “It was Emily Dickinson,” she corrects.

“Oh my god!” Allison croaks as Agnes reappears with coffee and a tray of donuts. She’s piled Diego’s donut holes in a ceramic soup bowl, which feels like it’s intended as a judgemental comment on his life choices. “This is the best thing that has ever happened. Vanya, I’m so happy for you.” She pauses in the act of unwrapping a straw and sweeps the rest of the table with a gimlet stare. “Isn’t it great that Vanya is finding out important information about herself and being _honest_ and _open_ with us about her _feelings_?”

There’s a long pause. “Yes?” Luther finally offers, sounding unsure of his answer.

“I guess,” Diego says mulishly, stuffing a donut hole into his mouth.

If Vanya were truly being open and honest with her siblings, she would step in to add some nuance to this assumption Allison has made about her sexuality. Instead of doing so, Vanya carefully picks each individual sprinkle off of her donut and eats them one at a time. The longer she says nothing, the harder it becomes to open her mouth. Each time she gathers up enough courage to peek at Five, he’s staring moodily into his coffee and the expression on his face--so hard and serious--kills Vanya’s incipient mettle stone dead and sends her scuttling back to her usual state of hunchbacked indecision. It’s easier, as it always has been, just to be silent.

~

In bed that night, Vanya carefully inspects her pink fingernails in the low amount of ambient streetlight that filters through the window blinds. Allison had painted them with the same speedy precision she might have used to assemble a rifle or dismantle a security system. Even if Vanya hadn’t already known that Allison was brave, here is further evidence: she has a whole _box_ of nail polish in her closet, in direct contradiction of Dad’s very firm ban on cosmetic enhancement of any kind. He’d laid down the law after Klaus had given himself an eye infection with a stick of glitter eyeliner that he’d stolen from a magazine photoshoot.

Vanya carefully strokes her right thumbnail, admiring the smooth surface under her calloused fingertips. Despite what the others might think, Vanya’s not completely oblivious. She knows that they sneak out a lot, that they have clothes of which Dad doesn’t approve, that Klaus has a drug dealer named Avery whom Vanya strongly suspects is Avery Bakersfield, her AP Chemistry lab partner. Last year, Allison had gone out in broad daylight and gotten her hair put into twists and she and Dad had gotten into a screaming argument about it that had ended with Dad reluctantly allowing that maybe Mom hadn’t been properly programmed to handle natural hair, which he had then addressed by updating her programming, of course, rather than allowing Allison to go to a salon again.

It’s one thing to know that her siblings get special treats and enough leash to bend Dad’s purportedly ironclad rules and something else entirely to be folded into that experience. What will she do if Dad notices her fingernails? Would Vanya even be capable of lying to him? But she can’t just betray Allison.

Lost in this dizzy haze of self-recrimination and panic, Vanya almost misses the three quiet knocks above her head. It’s been so long that she doesn’t recognize their meaning right away. _Is Mom cleaning the guest room?_ she wonders for approximately half a second, before that wonderful, terrifying wave of knowledge crashes over her head. _Five!_

Vanya wriggles her way out of her bedsheets and lurches to her feet, her mattress wobbling unsteadily beneath her. A broken spring digs into the arch of her bare foot as she adjusts her weight and launches herself into a jump. It takes her a few tries to get enough height to knock her knuckles against the ceiling. Five jumps in instantaneously, closer than Vanya would have predicted: onto the bed with her, only a few inches away. The springs of Vanya’s bed give a protesting chorus of squeals at their shared weight.

“Hey,” Vanya whispers, after a few seconds of silence make it clear that Five will not speak first.

“Hey,” Five echoes. There’s just enough light for Vanya to make out the planes of his face--his eyes, sunken, in shadow, his sharp cheekbones, the curve of his jaw. He’d been much softer when he left her, she remembers. Mom had liked to pinch his cheek when her programming interpreted his statements as _talking back_ (Dad had always just bellowed, “Insubordination!”). Vanya doubts Mom could get enough of a grip now to manage a pinch.

Vanya bites the inside corner of her mouth, unsure of what to say. Five has never really been the sort to allow someone else to direct a conversation. Not for the first time today, Vanya finds herself marveling at how Five has returned to her so different and yet so clearly himself. It’s proving impossible for her to find her footing with him. Is it their time apart that has done this to them? Or perhaps Five was always going to grow up into a perplexing, confusing adult and no amount of childhood confidences would have been able to help Vanya navigate him. 

“I’m sorry if Nikki upset you,” she finally decides to say.

Five blinks down at her; she can just make out the dark sweep of his eyelashes. “Don’t say that,” he tells her, voice tight.

Vanya says, staunchly, “Well, it’s true.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s true,” Five replies irritably. “I shouldn’t have been upset about it, so there’s no need for you to apologize.”

“I’m still your friend,” Vanya promises. This feels a little reckless; there’s no way to know if this is why Five is upset, but it seems as good a guess as any. Five had never been the kind of child who willingly shared what he considered his. Ben had once asked to borrow Five’s copy of the Dryden translation of _The Aeneid_ and Five had said no, if Ben wanted to read it so badly he ought to just translate it himself from the Latin text in Dad’s library. “You’ll always be my best friend. Nikki never talked to me until school started a few weeks ago. I don’t really know what changed, to be honest.”

Five exhales through his teeth. “That’s really not the mystery here.”

“Five, you’re still my friend, aren’t you?” Vanya asks. She has no idea where the courage to say this comes from; it seems to well up inside of her, like she has a burbling spring of bravery somewhere behind her belly button.

For a handful of heartrending seconds, Five says nothing. He seems to be looking at Vanya’s face, although it’s hard to tell what he could possibly make out in the poor light.

“Yes,” he finally says.

Vanya’s chest feels too tight, like she’s put on a pajama shirt that has shrunk in the wash. “You had to think about it,” she observes miserably. “It’s--it’s okay, I guess? If the answer is no, you should just tell me. You were gone for a long time. I understand if things changed for you.”

“Vanya, trust me: nothing changed,” Five tells her. “I had a long time to do nothing but think and mostly I thought about you. But we’re not meeting again under the circumstances that I had envisioned.”

His tone of voice is so strange; so very serious, deeper than his normal pitch. Vanya wishes she could see his face a little better.

“What did you imagine?” Vanya asks.

After a few seconds, Five gives an aborted, breathless huff of a laugh and says, “A shipwrecked mariner, plunging forth to grasp the land. Pallas holding back the rising day.”

“Streaming light beaming over the eastern hills?” Vanya prompts.

“Yes,” Five agrees raspily. 

“I’m sorry that me blubbering over you wasn’t the homecoming that you envisioned,” Vanya jokes, poorly. She can hear her own palpable awkwardness. In the dark, at his new height, Five seems so very far away from her. 

“It was everything that I wanted,” Five says. “I just can’t help realizing that it’s not--right. Vanya, there’s so much you don’t know.”

Vanya reaches up and very slowly puts her hands on Five’s shoulders. When he says nothing, does nothing, she pushes her palms over his shoulders, around his neck and down his back, and steps forward so their bodies are resting against one another in a careful embrace. Her mattress complains with sad squeaks.

“‘But why these sorrows when my lord arrives?’” she recites against his shoulder. He isn’t wearing his blazer; she can feel that Klaus’ button-down is too small, the seams straining under her cheek when she rests her head against the curve of his neck. Although Five is breathing, he has not moved. “Five, you’re supposed to hug me back,” she whispers.

“Hard and distrustful, my ass,” Five mutters. “You’ve got the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.” His arms lock around her, sudden and swift, so tightly that it forces a startled exhale from Vanya’s lungs.

They stand there together for a while. Vanya has never hugged someone for this long before. She keeps waiting for it to become awkward, but each passing minute makes her more and more relaxed, like each one of her muscles comes to the realization that Five is here, that he’s real, that he’s home, and is finally able to release its stiff tension. Three years’ worth of physical agony unburdens itself in minutes so long that they feel like they’ve turned to syrup.

“How long were you gone, really?” she asks Five eventually. Her face is squashed against his neck; her question comes out a little nasally.

“Long enough that my behavior this evening is embarrassing,” Five says drily. And then, more softly, tilting his chin so she can feel the press of his cheek against the top of her head: “I’ll tell you about it, okay? Later.”

“Sure,” Vanya agrees sleepily. “You’ll stay?”

“I’m staying,” Five says. “I’m not going anywhere. How many times are you gonna make me say that?”

“Just one more time,” Vanya promises, although that’s undoubtedly a lie.

Five tightens his grip around her waist. Vanya’s eyes are beginning to prickle so she squeezes them shut; it’s not like she can see much, anyway. “Vanya,” he says, gently, slowly rubbing his cheek over her hair. Her name is almost a sigh. “Don’t worry, okay? I’m home. Whatever is coming next, we’re going to handle it together.”

~

For the rest of her life, no matter how bizarre everything becomes afterwards--superpowers! detoxing from horse tranquilizers! AP Physics!--Vanya will always remember her sixteenth birthday as the most perfect day in existence. She asks Allison for the small bottle labeled _ballet slippers_ and keeps it tucked away in her violin case, where she can open it any time she feels scared or overwhelmed. The scent of acetone never fails to send her catapulting back in time to that wonderful day: Five, finally home; Vanya, finally herself.


End file.
